Dean Jensen
Milwaukee Sentinel, Let’s Go
Friday, August 27, 1982

This feminist artwork refined, elegant

The impact that the women’s movement is having on the art of our time still is little commented upon in the art press, except in periodicals, like the Feminist Art Journal and Ms.

But one can hardly traipse to galleries in museums of contemporary art these days without being impressed by the great amount of invention going on by women artist who found ways to express themselves in their own terms without looking to the standard (read masculine) models.

The neo-expressionists, neo-constructivists, neo naïve and resurrectionists of other old styles may have been hogging the columns of today‘s art press, but 20 or 30 years from now, it is quite possible that art historians and aestheticians will look back at the feminist movement at this most revolutionizing tendency of art from this period.

One of the more accomplished votaries of the feminist art from this area is Lisa Englander.

Englander, a Milwaukeean, has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions throughout the state and now has a large show that is continuing through September 16 at Bradley Galleries, 2565 North Downer Ave.

She has developed a distinctive, highly personalized art in which her imagery is derived from articles like exotic flowers, decorative hand fans, and rich-looking fabrics that popularly are associated with what used to be called the gentler sex.

Englander’s art is certainly not aimed at mass consciousness – raising as was the intent for such clearly political feminist work as Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party” or the controversial installation piece created by Nikki de Sainte-Phalle a few years back when viewers entered the vagina of a huge Venus and walked around outside its innards.

Englander’s is, nonetheless, a determinedly feminist art, and art which brings together her consciousness of being feminine with her identity, as an artist.

Her art is refined, profusely, decorative, and unashamedly elegant. Some may find it an antidote to those paintings that today are much the rage when artist spill their steaming guts onto canvas.

Her so-called “Fan Studies” – works in which she has collaged graphite, drawings, paintings, and jewel-colored and Klimt – gold papers that suggest expensive brocades and silks – are hardly larger than postage stamps. But she packs more splendor into these miniatures than some artists can get into 10 yards of canvas.

Her large watercolors may be distant kin to pattern art, but it is really hard to find models for the works in contemporary art. They seem closest in spirit to those scroll paintings of flowers and butterflies that Chinese women did in the garden studios during the Ming period while male artists went out to paint mountains and skies. And like the ancient Chinese scroll painters, Englander offered includes hand written poems with the works.

She divides her paper into panels, with each square revealing a universal flowers, fans and exotic fabrics. They are paintings of a woman with an observant eye and a drawing hand that reveals not just the superficial qualities of her flowers and objects, but also some of their mystery. In discussions of the experimentation going on in the graphics arts today, one often hears the expression “painterly“ prints. Englander‘s watercolor is most closely suggest “printerly” paintings. They are so meticulously done that they almost appear to have been executed by a print press rather than a human hand.

As successful as Englander’s collage water colors are her paper constructions come off as knickknacks well the pieces use the same imagery that is found in a two-dimensional works. They simply are too slick and cloying.